Date of Award:

5-2021

Document Type:

Thesis

Degree Name:

Master of Science (MS)

Department:

Human Development and Family Studies

Committee Chair(s)

Sarah Tulane

Committee

Sarah Tulane

Committee

Aryn Dotterrer

Committee

Melanie Jewkes

Abstract

The purposes of this study are to assess the most frequently addressed topics that the public has for Family Consumer Sciences (FCS) related Extension professionals and to indicate whether the topics are changing over time, with a specific interest in changes to food safety and preservation inquiries. The CES office in one county in a western state has been collecting FCS data from the years 2010 to 2019. This data is about the FCS-specific phone calls received to the office. The data was then coded and put into an Excel spreadsheet. There were a total of 5,863 phone calls with 695 male callers, 5,151 female callers, and 17 preferred to not answer. These phone calls came from 210 different zip codes, representing 24 states and territories of the United States and several international calls. There were 38 topics recorded on the spreadsheet, which were then condensed into five categories. The five categories are as follows: food preservation, food safety, nutrition, food safety, and marriage and finances. Descriptive statistics were used to get an overview of the trends in the data. Following that, one-way independent groups ANOVA will determine the changes in frequencies of food safety and food preservation calls over the ten-year span. It is hypothesized that the frequency of both food safety and food preservation calls will decrease over time. Findings report that there is a downward trend in all phone call topics. There is a significant decrease in calls from 2010-2019 in the food safety and food preservation categories.

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